Procurement Performance Improvement
Procurement is the biggest value lever that drives fast EBITDA impact. We have deep expertise in supporting PE funds and their portfolio companies to identify maximum value potential and tangibly deliver that impact through a hands-on, operator-led delivery model.
An outside-in, independent, early view of a target's spend and supply base, built before full data access. Gives investors a sense of scale so procurement upside is built into the investment thesis from the start.
We pressure test the procurement claims in the information memorandum against our benchmarks and deep category expertise, assessing underlying cost exposure, supplier concentration and contract risk.
The procurement workstream within the wider ODD, quantifying value creation potential across demand, technical and commercial levers, driving full sustainable EBITDA impact leveraging AI enablers.
A granular review of third-party spend, supplier contracts and supply base to build a bottom-up view of savings potential, leveraging a full range of value levers and A&M benchmarks, together with our proprietary AI toolkit.
Our senior team works hands on alongside management & client’s procurement team to deliver the savings identified, taking each category from strategy through to negotiation to contract, with impact tracked through to the P&L.
Detailed analytical review of product and service specifications in close collaboration with cross-functional teams to optimise cost at the design stage, ahead of negotiations.
We build the procurement structure, governance and roles needed to sustain performance over the long term, whether as part of a wider engagement or as a standalone piece of work, sized to the business rather than a standard template.
Live visibility over spend across the business, paired with the controls to act on it, catching maverick and off-contract spend as it happens and holding on to savings already won rather than letting them leak back out.
Senior procurement specialists lead negotiations directly on the deals where supplier leverage, complexity or strategic importance raise the stakes.
How We Work
An AI toolkit runs beneath every offering, accelerating granular spend analysis, detailed contract review, should-cost modelling across the entire SKU portfolio, driving automation in RFPs and scaling up negotiations - cutting the time to the measurable P&L impact.
Scope of Work: Data management for leading extrusion OEM manufacturer in the US with large volumes of raw data from multiple ERP systems
- AI-powered spend data management, harmonising and baselining spend across 20+ business units and 10+ ERP systems to deliver a single, unified spend cube
- Data included multilingual supplier nomenclature spread across geographies, having 1M+ lines of entries
- Entity, AI-powered agent, normalises supplier names, feeding into Classifier, another AI agent, for taxonomy-based spend categorisation.
- Opportunity Identification: Post data transformation through two AI agents, there’s auto generation of spend profiles and cuts to understand spend spread across regions
Solution Requirements
- Ensure data integrity and multi-source integration
- Auto classification based on item description and vendor base
- Automated data ingestion and analysis across frameworks
- Leverage existing FAQs and historical conversations to train fit-for-purpose models
Tools and technologies applied
- Classify-Pro and Entity (AI powered inhouse tool)
- Spend Impact (inhouse end to end tool for data analysis and opportunity assessment)
Key learnings (Problem Archetype)
- Sub-par data quality including nonexistent item code structure
- Non-standard categorization across BUs for similar parts and suppliers
- Rapid prototyping (4-week sprint) is sufficient to demonstrate tangible value and secure buy-in for broader portfolio application
Impact / Deliverables
- Detailed view of spend across the BUs and regions within 1-2 days rather than 2-3 weeks
- Dynamic spend analysis, enabled through the analysis of suppliers and spend to identify savings opportunities
- Reduction of effort and cost by over 50% of resource time
- Enabled a unified view of spend, along with an opportunity assessment, identifying savings potential of $6M-$8M
Scope of Work: Contract extraction & processing in Europe for pharmaceutical company with 100s of supplier documents
- Consumption of 350+ MSAs and contracts, majorly both standard PDFs and picture-based PDFs as per defined contractual terms like delivery terms, OTIF rules, SLA terms, pricing structure, etc.
- Generating auto inserts on clause parameters for client’s supply contracts to identify and map OTIF implications and contract compliance across clauses, like forecasting and order management, performance and SLAs, delivery and logistics, and its related penalties
- Drafting a contracting mechanism and best-in-class contracting clauses by integration of existing and industry data
Solution Requirements
- Ensure data extraction integrity of contractual terms
- Auto inserts across the files with high accuracy
- Automated data ingestion and analysis across frameworks
- Leverage existing FAQs and historical conversations to train fit-for-purpose models
Tools and technologies applied
- Contract AI (inhouse tool with ability to extract key attributes on commercials, dates, parties involved, legal clauses on transaction)
Key learnings (Problem Archetype)
- Sub-par data quality including image-based pdf formats
- Mutli-meaning clauses of similar nature, whereby rapid prototyping (2-week sprint) is sufficient to demonstrate tangible value and secure buy-in for broader portfolio application
Impact / Deliverables
- Faster turnaround, reducing effort by 60-70% compared with doing it the traditional way
- Reduction of effort and cost by over 50% of resource time
- Insights on 350 major contracts with 130+ MSAs having:
- Varied payment terms
- Unstructured or limited price inflation matrix
- Missing detailed OTIF calculations and lenient tolerance limits
- Limited visibility on contract continuity terms
We're bringing together experienced procurement professionals who want to work directly with private equity investors and portfolio company management teams on complex value creation challenges.
Contact Us.
MEET THE TEAM
